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PKOPESTY OF TEE 
IBKAHY OF COuXGHESS 




ABRAHA.M LJNC'OLX 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

PEOPEETY OF THE 
ITBRARY OF CONGMSS 

THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 



BY 



WILMOT BROOKINGS MITCHELL 

Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory 
Bowdoin College 



Portland, Maine 
Smith & Sale, Publishers 
1910 



£4S7 

>y 2 



COPYRIGHT BY 

SMITH & SALE, PUBLISHERS 

1910 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 



There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of 
nations, 7vhich stakes little account of time, little of one 
generation or race, makes no account of disasters, con- 
quers alike by ivhat is called defeat or by what is called 
victory, thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes 
everything immoral as inhuman and obtaifts the ulti- 
mate triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of every- 
thing zvhich resists the moral laivs of the 7vorld. It 
makes its oiun instruments, creates the man for the time, 
trains him in poverty, inspires his genius, and arms him 
for the task. 

EMERSON. 



'1' 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

This man whose homely face you look upon, 

Was one of nature's masterful, great men ; 
Born with strong arms, that unf ought battles won ; 

Direct of speech, and cunning with the pen. 
Chosen for large designs, he had the art 

Of winning with his humor, and he went 
Straight to his mark, 7vhich jvas the human heart ; 

Wise, too, for what he could not break he bent. 
Upon his back a more thati Atlas-load, 

The burden oj the Comtnomvealth, was laid ; 
He stooped, and rose up to it, though the road 

Shot suddenly downwards, not a whit dismayed. 
Hold, warriors, councillors, kings / All now give place 
To this dear benefactor of the race.^ 



' From The Poetical Writings of Richard Henry Stoddard ; 
copyright, 1880, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 



A FOREWORD 

^ I ^HE basis of this little book is a 
"■" centenary address given by the 
author at Bowdoin College, February 12, 
1909, and at Augusta, Maine, on the 
same day, at a Lincoln celebration by the 
State Legislature. The author makes no 
claim to original investigation. He has 
gathered the facts chiefly from the many 
different biographies of Lincoln ; has sought, 
amid the conflicting statements that cluster 
around the life of this great man, to dis- 
criminate between the true and the false; 
and either in the text or the appended 
references has cited the important sources 
of his information, and has endeavored to 
give credit where credit is due. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 



When the Norn-Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour, 
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, 
She bent the strenuous Heavens and came down, 
7o make a man to meet the mortal need. 

MARKHAM. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 



ON the morning of Monday, February ii, 1861, in 
front of "the dingy little railroad station" in 
Springfield, Illinois, there clustered eagerly around a 
train a throng of a thousand people or more. Just as 
the train was about to start and the conductor already 
had his hand upon the bell-rope to give the signal, 
there appeared upon the rear platform a tall, dark- 
complexioned man with unruly hair and a scraggly 
beard of a few months' growth, who " raised his hand 
to command attention." At once the head of every 
man in that throng was bared to the falling snow- 
flakes,' as Abraham Lincoln spoke these " chaste and 
pathetic" words to his old friends and neighbors who 
had come to bid him Godspeed : 

" J/y Friends: — No one, not in my situation, can 
appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To 
this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe 
everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, 
and have passed from a young to an old man. Here 
my children have been born, and one is buried. I now 
leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may 
return, with a task before me greater than that which 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of 
that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot 
succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trust- 
ing in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, 
and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope 
that all will yet be well. To His care commending 
you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, 
I bid you an affectionate farewell." 

At the close of these words, the last that those 
friends and neighbors were ever to hear from his lips, 
the train rolled out, and the President-elect had gone 
forth to meet his great task. 

And it was indeed a task " greater than that which 
rested upon Washington." He was to be "no holiday 
magistrate, no fair-weather sailor." He was, as Emer- 
son says, " the new pilot hurried to the helm in a torna- 
do." ' The long, bitter struggle between the North 
and the South over the extension of slavery was at the 
crisis. The Union was breaking up. Already seven 
large states had seceded and others were but hesitat- 
ing. Even while Mr. Lincoln was making this mem- 
orable journey, delegates from six of the seceding 
states were assembled at Montgomery, Alabama, to 
establish a provisional government under the title of 
"The Confederate States of America." Through the 
slavery cabal of Southern Senators and Representa- 
tives at Washington, through the treachery of Presi- 
dent Buchanan's cabinet, three members of which had 
openly or secretly abetted the insurrection,^ through 
the weakness and vacillation of President Buchanan 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

himself, the treasury was depleted, the public credit 
was shattered, northern arsenals were but poorly 
equipped, and much Federal property — harbor forts, 
a navy-yard, mints, arsenals, custom-houses, and rev- 
enue cutters — was now held firm within the clutch of 
the conspirators. European governments, too, were 
watching the conflict closely and but half concealed 
their desire to have the Union torn asunder. England 
and France seemed only to be waiting for a pretext be- 
fore they recognized the Confederacy. 

Moreover the Government was menaced by the 
widespread demoralization of its friends. Fear, folly, 
and factional differences were rife among them. In 
the last part of October, i860, General Scott, at the 
head of the army, had suggested to the President that 
the country be divided into four separate confedera- 
cies and even named some of their possible bound- 
aries.' Now the Democratic papers of the North were 
advocating peace at any price. Horace Greeley, 
through his influential New York Tribune, was declar- 
ing that if the Cotton States " choose to form an inde- 
pendent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so " 
and if " the great body of the Southern people " desire 
"to escape from the Union, we will do our best to 
forward their views."- Even men like Governor 
Seward, when face to face with threatening rebellion, 
became weak-kneed and seemed eager to grant almost 
any concession to conciliate the South. And besides 
this there was the insistent demand of the New Eng- 
land Abolitionists that slavery be destroyed whether 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the Union were preserved or not. Amid all this Babel 
of voices, this confusion of opinions and motives and 
forces, of personal ambitions and partisan prejudices 
and misguided patriotism, of sectional bitterness and 
racial hate, there was dire necessity for a calm, clear 
brain, an unyielding will, and an honest heart. Was 
the President-elect equal to the task ? Could he save 
the Union? 

" Upon his back a more than Atlas-load, 

The burden of the Commonwealth, was laid." ■ 

" What manner of man is this that has come out of 
the West ? " the East was asking fearfully. " Alas, 
have the Republicans acted wisely in setting aside the 
tried and able and urbane Chase and the rich and cul- 
tured and experienced Seward for this unknown, inex- 
perienced, uncouth frontier lawyer ? " Many in fear 
and despair answered " No." Even while he was on 
his way to Washington, disturbing reports came to 
those who would be his friends. In his desire not to 
commit himself too firmly to any policy until he knew 
the facts more thoroughly, he tried to reassure the 
people at Columbus, Ohio, by telling them, so it was 
reported, that " Nothing is going wrong " and the east- 
ern papers shouted " Simple Susan." ^ At Westfield, 
New York, with much ado he lifted up in his long arms, 
and kissed before the applauding crowd, the little girl 
who had written him a few months before that he 
would improve his looks by growing a beard, and 
whose advice he had at once followed. 3 At Harris- 
burg he suddenly disappeared from the hotel and as 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

mysteriously appeared the next morning in Washing- 
ton. His opponents chuckled derisively ; and many 
of his friends were chagrined that his trip had ended 
so unceremoniously. Was he a trifler, a buffoon, a 
coward ? The Democratic papers referred to him con- 
temptuously as " The Illinois Lawyer, " and in the 
South such papers as the Richmond Examiner, with 
malicious virulence, called him "Lincoln the Beast," 
"The Nigger," "The Illinois Ape."' What were the 
facts ? What of the man, his birth, his breeding, his 
preparation for this Herculean task ? 

His biography has been writ large. Every nook 
and cranny of his life has been searched with micro- 
scopic eye. Nothing has been too trivial to be of 
interest if it concerned him. We have, therefore, to-day 
a large body of literature, of poems and novels, of 
anecdotes and essays, of histories and biographies and 
even dramas, founded upon the acts and personality of 
this man. 

The scene and circumstances of his birth on Febru- 
ary 12, 1809, were far from pleasant and promising. 
The little one-roomed log cabin in which he was born 
on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in the woods of 
Kentucky, was of the rudest sort, — fourteen feet square, 
without floor or windows, and containing only the bar- 
est necessities. To this home Thomas Lincoln had 
brought his wife Nancy and their infant daughter 
Sarah some two years before ; and here from the woods 
and from the soil that was thin and unproductive they 
were able to wrest but a scanty living. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

As to just how much Lincoln was indebted to his 
ancestry authorities differ. " I don't know who my 
grandfather was and am much more concerned to know 
what his grandson will be " Lincoln used to say in 
later days. Many biographers tell us that his father, 
Thomas Lincoln, was a thriftless, shiftless, vagrant 
ne'er-do-well, similar to the " poor-white trash, " the 
" low-flung people " of the South ; ' while others main- 
tain that the conditions in which he lived were those 
of all pioneers of his day and that it was the spirit of 
adventure which he had inherited from his fathers and 
his desire to improve his condition that made him so 
often abandon one farm for another and push out upon 
the frontier. ^ At all odds we know that he was at 
ten " a wandering, laboring boy " and that " he grew 
up literally without education." 3 We are also told 
that at twenty-five he was a carpenter of some skill, 
owned a small farm, and had the "reputation of being 
good-natured, and obliging, and possessing what his 
neighbors called 'good, strong horse sense.'"-* He 
was also, from his point of view, a moral, indeed a relig- 
ious man. One biographer mentions the facts that he 
was appointed a road surveyor in 1816, possessed a 
Bible, a very expensive book at that time, and that he 
once purchased on credit a pair of silk suspenders 
worth one dollar and a half. 

It seems likely that Lincoln's garrulous cousin, Den- 
nis Hanks, came near the truth when he said, " Tom 
was strong, an' he wasn't lazy nor afeerd o' nothin', 
but he was kind o' shif'less — couldn't git nothin' 

8 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

ahead, an' didn't keer putickalar. Lots o' them kind 
o' fellers in arly days, 'druther hunt an' fish, an' I 
reckon they had their use. They killed off the var- 
mints an' made it safe fur other fellers to go into the 
woods with an ax, . . Tom thought a heap o' Nancy, 
an' he was as good to her as he knowed how. He 
didn't drink or swear or play cyards or fight, an' them 
was drinkin', cussin', quarrelsome days. Tom was 
popylar, an' he could lick a bully if he had to. He 
jist couldn't git ahead, somehow. " ■ 

But what some may think a more important fact is 
that behind Thomas Lincoln there was a long line of 
energetic, thrifty, and intelligent ancestors, many of 
whom were Quakers. The first of his family in this 
country came from Norfolk, England, to Hingham, 
Massachusetts, in 1637, and it is of interest to New 
Englanders to know that to this family belonged Hon- 
orable Levi Lincoln, Attorney-General of the United 
States, also his two distinguished sons, Levi, who was 
nine times Governor of Massachusetts, and Enoch, who 
was three times Governor of Maine. 

The ancestry of Nancy Hanks is shrouded in mystery, 
but we know that Lincoln cherished her memory 
fondly. He once exclaimed : "God bless my mother; 
all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her." ^ At 
the time of Lincoln's birth she was twenty-six, frail 
but handsome, with dark brown hair, gray eyes, and 
refined features. Unlike the slow-going Thomas, whom 
she taught to write his name, she was by nature intel- 
lectual, with retentive memory and good judgment, of 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

delicate instincts, humorous at times, but often melan- 
choly, desiring, and dreaming of, a life less rough than 
that of the frontier, to which she was by nature ill 
suited. "Nancy," says Dennis Hanks, "was purty 
as a pictur an' smart as you 'd find 'em anywhere. 
She was turrible ashamed o' the way they lived, but 
she knowed Tom was doin' his best, an' she wasn't 
of the pesterin' kind." 

It was with such parents, in a rough pioneer home, 
under the grinding restrictions of poverty, that the boy 
grew up. His father, who had a mania for moving, 
first exchanged his farm for one fifteen miles away on 
Knob Creek, and a few years later, having traded his 
farm and cabin for ten barrels of whiskey and twenty 
dollars in cash, he transported his household goods 
over the Ohio and into the wilderness of Indiana. The 
boy's only acquaintances, during this time, outside of 
his own home, were settlers, coarse-grained, illiterate, 
and superstitious, almost the only elevating influence 
to touch his life, the love of a gentle mother. And 
before he was ten, death had taken his mother from 
him. Within a year, however, his father brought 
another wife into the home. Fortunately her influ- 
ence was for good. She sympathized with young Abe 
in his desire to read, write, and cipher, and helped 
him in every way possible. 

The story of that boy as he grew to manhood is now 
a household legend cherished in every American home : 
a chore boy ; at seventeen, " a terribly muscular clod- 
hopper, " as Schurz says, " six feet four in his stock- 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

ings, if he had any, given to fits of abstraction and to 
strange spells of melancholy from which he would 
often pass in a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll 
humor ; " a rail splitter ; a farm hand " practising polem- 
ics " from a stump in the hay-field ; a clerk in the store 
of Denton Offut at New Salem, Illinois, so honest that 
when one day making change he took six cents over- 
much from a customer, he could not go to bed until 
that evening after his day's work, he had walked three 
miles to pay back the money ; a champion wrestler, able 
to put the most sinewy of the Clarey's Grove Gang 
upon his back ; a story-teller enchanting the village with 
his droll tales; a captain in the Black Hawk War; a 
member of the unlucky firm of Kerry and Lincoln, the 
latter of whom sprawled on his store counter, or on the 
grass in the orchard, " with his bare feet up a tree " and 
read Blackstone, while his " dissolute partner drank 
whiskey ; " ' a bankrupt whose store had " winked out " 
and left him with the " national debt, " as he called 
it, of Si I CO on his hands; a postmaster carrying 
the mail around in his hat ; a deputy-surveyor ; an 
almost desperate lover grieving for Ann Rutledge ; a 
candidate for the Legislature and not a very promising 
one either, we should say, " in a mixed jeans coat, 
clawhammer style, short in the sleeves and bobtailed, 
flax-and-tow-linen pantaloons, a straw hat and potmetal 
boots, " - a wardrobe hardly up even to the Sangamon 
County standard. But fortunately the good people 
of his county, we remember, knew that clothes do not 
make the man, and they soon discovered that he was, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

as they said, "a perfect take-in ; he knew more than all 
of the other candidates put together. " ■ 

Of his experiences as a legislator ; of his triumphs 
during his twenty-five years' practice at the Illinois bar ; 
of his famous speech at the Springfield Convention, 
when, as he put it, willing to " go down linked to the 
truth in the advocacy of what" was " just and right, " ^ 
he said : " A house divided against itself cannot stand. 
I believe this Government cannot endure permanently 
half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be 
dissolved ; I do not expect the house to fall — but I do 
expect it will cease to be divided ; " of his love-making 
conquests, in which as a lank, uncouth barrister he got 
the better of the polished, gallant Stephen Douglas 
and thereby won the hand of Mary Todd ; of his more 
famous victory in debate over the Little Giant, when, 
with his sharp-pointed questions concerning slavery and 
states-rights, he pierced the armor of his opponent and 
unfitted Douglas for the presidency ; or of that speech 
of which it is said,3 " lifting himself to his full height, 
he reached his hands towards the stars of the still night 
and there fell from his lips one of the most sublime 
expressions of American statesmanship: 'In the right 
to eat the bread his own hands have earned, the negro 
is the equal of Judge Douglas or any other living 
man ; ' " and of his nomination, and election to the pres- 
idency, I need not here speak in detail. It is enough 
to say that in all these we find the same man, shrewd, 
sturdy, unconventional, sympathetic, always eager to 
play fair, with a keen sense of humor, but with a 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

deep undertone of melancholy that does not allow us 
to forget that mother buried in the little forest clearing. 
Such in brief was the Atlantean task and such were 
the birth and the breeding of the man whom the people 
had called to it. Was the voice of the people the voice 
of God ? I believe it was. In heart and mind, by birth 
and breeding, Abraham Lincoln was peculiarly fitted 
to deal with that awful crisis in American history. 
Although he had served but one term in the national 
councils, and that many years before, he comprehended 
the problem of slavery and the Union as a national 
problem, understood its significance for all sections of 
the country, as thoroughly as any statesman of that 
time, and felt its seriousness as keenly. His great 
heart made him hate slavery. The abounding kind- 
ness of his whole nature protested against its injustice. 
From his earliest boyhood, to see others, even dumb 
animals, in pain cut him to the quick. At his first school 
his anger was aroused by seeing some boys put a live 
coal upon a wood turtle's back, and one of the first bits 
of prose he ever wrote was a protest against cruelty to 
animals. Years later, when he had grown to manhood, 
Lawyer Lincoln, riding the Eighth Circuit, jumped from 
his buggy, and hazarded his dignity and his clothes by 
wading waist-deep into the mire to save a struggling 
pig. As a captain in the Black Hawk War, he risked 
his life by protecting an old Indian from rough and 
angry soldiers who thought they had captured a spy. 
To such a man, the strongest element in whose strong 
nature was kindliness, slavery with its cruelties was 

13 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

revolting. On a trip to New Orleans when he was 
twenty-one he saw a slave auction. The scene filled 
him with an unconquerable hate. " Boys, let 's get 
away from this," he said. " If I ever get a chance to 
hit that thing, I '11 hit it hard." 

While in the State Legislature, when abolition was ex- 
tremely unpopular in Illinois, in 1837, only one year 
before Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Lincoln against 
overwhelming odds, entered a protest " declaring the 
institution of slavery to be founded on both injustice 
and bad policy. " 

With him slavery was not merely a party issue ; it 
was a great moral question. Unlike Douglas he cared 
much whether it was voted up or voted down. His 
cause was hearted. Nothing had ever aroused him 
like this. In other questions, the tariff, finance, inter- 
nal improvements, he took but a perfunctory interest. 
But when the Missouri Compromise was repealed 
and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill with its squatter sover- 
eignty doctrine became a law, his moral nature was 
stirred to its depths. He plunged heart and soul 
" into an arduous study of all the legal, historical, and 
moral aspects " of the slavery question.' He brooded 
over them day and night. To what good effect his de- 
bates with Douglas showed. 

But though Lincoln hated the institution of slavery as 
much as did the New England Abolitionists, he under- 
stood other sections of the country far better than did 
they; for he was an Illinoisan, and Illinois in 1850 was 
a miniature Union. Because of its peculiar location, 

14 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

the East and the West, the North and the South, 
Cavalier and Puritan, within its borders met and 
mingled. From this vantage ground Lincoln was able 
to comprehend the views of all. For this and other 
reasons he has been called by poet and historian "the 
First American." Mr. Woodrow Wilson in his "Calen- 
dar of Great Americans " tells us, in substance, that 
Hamilton and Madison were great Englishmen bred in 
America, that John Adams and Calhoun were great pro- 
vincials, that "Jefferson was not a thorough American 
because of the strain of French philosophy that per- 
meated and weakened all his thought,'' that " Jackson 
was altogether of the West" — " a frontier statesman " 
— and having no social imagination, "no unfamiliar 
community made any impression on him, " that in 
Henry Clay " East and West were mixed without 
being fused," but in Lincoln all "elements were com- 
bined and harmonized." " He was," says Mr, Wilson, 
"the supreme American in histoiy. As he stands 
there in his complete manhood at the most perilous 
helm in Christendom, what a marvelous composite fig- 
ure he is 1 The whole country is summed up in him." 
Lincoln was first of all a Westerner, the child of the 
pioneer, rejoicing in physical strength, smacking ever 
of the rough life of the men who cut down the forest 
and won the West ; of those men who had forgotten 
the ways of the seacoast or of the Old World, if they 
had ever known them ; from whom all artificial social 
distinctions had been stripped ; outdoor, sinewy men 
of oak, in moccasins, buckskin breeches and coonskin 

IS 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

caps, keen of eye and lithe of limb, " embrowned in the 
sun, hardened in manner by a coarse life of change and 
danger." ' And from Lincoln this strain of coarse- 
ness that came from his contact with the raw and ele- 
mental was never entirely bred out. It appeared in 
the pungent joke, the racy story, in his rude manners, 
his unkempt dress, and his disregard of conventionality. 
Neither did he ever lose the strength and indepen- 
dence which this rough western life gave him, the habit 
of looking at things in the rough and the real, with 
the husks of artificiality stripped off. It was thus, una- 
bashed and unafraid, he dealt with great matters and 
great men. 

" The color of the ground was in him, the red Earth, 

The tang and odor of the primal things, 

The rectitude and patience of the rocks; 

The gladness of the wind that shakes the com ; 

The courage of the bird that dares the sea ; 

The justice of the rain that loves all leaves; 

The pity of the snow that hides all scars." 2 

And being a Westerner, Mr. Lincoln understood as 
no New Englander or Virginian could understand, the 
hopes and possibilities of the West, its significance in 
the nation's life. It has always been hard for the 
East to comprehend the West. It is to-day and it was 
especially difficult before railroad and telegraph bound 
them together. The early Easterner often thought of 
the nation as simply the strip of states along the Atlan- 
tic and the Gulf. This was civilized America. Beyond 
the mountains was the wilderness, to be peopled 

16 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

by the rougher, less successful, and more adventurous 
of the seacoast folk. To understand that a great com- 
posite nation was to be cut out of the wilderness, a 
nation of which the Atlantic States were but the fringe, 
violated the Easterner's local prejudice if it did not 
exceed his imagination. But Westerners like Lincoln 
caught a vision of at least a dim outlme of such a 
nation. And seeing this, they perceived the significance 
of the slave problem to the immigrant farmer and the 
son of the pioneer. Free soil, unencumbered by slave 
labor, was a necessity if the pioneer and his children 
were to come into their own, if the West was to realize 
its ambitions and live up to its possibilities. To the 
Westerner of the fifties the burning, paramount ques- 
tion was not concerning the existence of slavery in the 
South, but the extension of slavery into the new states 
and territories of the West. Shall the new lands be 
slave or free ? That was the question that occasioned 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and precipi- 
tated the Civil War, and that was the question about 
which Lincoln had thought more profoundly than 
almost any other statesman of his day. 

But not only did Lincoln hate slavery with all the 
intensity of a New England Abolitionist, not only did he 
know the West and sympathize with its ambitions, he 
also knew the South — its tone and temper and rights. 
From early boyhood he had rubbed elbows with pro- 
slavery men. With them, through the long range of the 
Eighth Circuit, for twenty-five years he had discussed 
the question in the grocery store and the village tavern. 

17 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

His wife was an aristocratic Kentuckian, and his clos- 
est friend, Joshua Speed, was a slaveholder. Lincoln 
knew the slaveholders' point of view. He knew that 
they were not all the brutal men whom the North had 
painted, that many of them were kind masters, chival- 
rous gentlemen, who thought that slavery was right 
and just, even humane, and who sincerely believed that, 
in maintaining their right to secede, they were with- 
standing invasion as gallantly as did their Revolution- 
ary fathers. 

And while he could not sympathize with this point 
of view, he at the same time recognized that the South 
did have rights. He knew that slavery was protected 
by the Constitution. He knew that slaves were, in a 
sense, property ; and loving law as thoroughly as an 
Easterner, surely upon his accession to the presidency, 
he had no thought of setting free the southern slave, 
of taking any man's property from him, without recom- 
pense. It was because he understood the South so 
well that he later suggested again and again to his Cab- 
inet and to Congress that the South be recompensed 
for slaves set free. He surely was a friend of the 
South as well as of the North, indeed the South's best 
friend, many Southerners say to-day, although then 
they did not realize it. 

But when Lincoln came to the presidency, the ques- 
tion that confronted the nation was not the existence 
of slavery in the South or the extension of slavery in 
the West but the greater question growing out of these, 
the existence of the Union, the right of States to secede. 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

Upon this question Lincoln stood firm as a rock. 
From beginning to end he was a Unionist. There was 
never a bit of wavering. Lincoln was a lover of law. 
He reverenced the Declaration of Independence and 
the Constitution of the United States. Upon these he 
had meditated day and night. The Constitution he 
knew was a sacred compact not to be broken. He 
believed this as firmly as did Webster, whose speech in 
reply to Hayne he placed at the acme of American 
Oratory. As fervently as did Webster he had prayed 
that his eyes might never look upon States " dissevered, 
discordant, belligerent." This supreme desire he later 
emphatically expressed in his now famous letter to 
Horace Greeley : " I would save the Union. I would 
save it in the shortest way under the Constitution. My 
paramount object is to save the Union, and not either 
to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union 
without freeing any slave, I would do it ; if I could save 
it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I 
could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I 
would also do that. What I do about slavery and the 
colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the 
Union ; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not 
believe it would help to save the Union. I have here 
stated my purpose according to my views of oflricial 
duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed 
personal wish that all men everywhere could be free." ' 
It is for these reasons that I Ihink Abraham Lincoln 
comprehended the problem of slavery and the Union 
as a national problem, and understood its significance 

19 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

for all sections of the country, and felt its seriousness, 
as thorouglily as any statesman of his time. 

Mr. Lincoln also had an instinct for leadership. As 
Mr. Rothschild has well shown in his admirable biog- 
raphy, he was by nature a master of men. I do not 
mean that he was a man of blood and iron who by 
sheer strength beat down all opposition to his desires 
and purposes, and with an iron hand compelled others 
to obey him. He ruled by subtler means. He won 
the hearts of men by those forces which we include 
under the vague phrase "personal magnetism." 

" Chosen for large designs, he had the art 
Of winning with his humor, and he went 
Straight to his mark, which was the human lieart." 

Even those who obeyed him could not always tell 
why they did so. Men would go to him as enraged 
enemies and come away loyal friends. Sometimes his 
humor or tact robbed them of suspicion. But often it 
was the clearness of his reasoning and his speech, his 
absolute simplicity and frankness and sincerity that 
aroused their enthusiasm and won their affections. 
" A complete man," says Emerson in his essay on 
Behavior, " should need no auxiliaries to his personal 
presence. Whoever looked on him should consent to 
his will, being certified that his aims were generous and 
universal. The reason why men do not obey us is 
because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye." 
Men looked into Lincoln's eye ; they saw no mud ; and 
they obeyed him. His strength was " as the strength 
of ten " because his heart was pure. 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

When he went to Washington as President, how he 
amazed the politicians ! At first his directness and 
patience, his candor and modesty, his rough humor 
and unconventionality, were so misunderstood that even 
some of his cabinet mistook them for clownishness, 
vacillation, or stupidity. But it did not take some of 
them long to learn who was to be master. They found 
before many weeks that they were dealing with a shrewd 
and honest intellect, a firm will, and a large heart. 
Perhaps nowhere were these powers more clearly 
shown than in the handling of his mistrustful and 
factious cabinet, made up of old-time Democrats and 
old-time Whigs and new-time Republicans, the strong- 
est, most influential men that he could muster, his 
"happy family," as he used to call them. 

Secretary Seward, the able and experienced states- 
man from the Empire State, was the first to learn his 
lesson. Mistaking Lincoln's simplicity for incompe- 
tence, he essayed to manage the administration. He 
revised the President's First Inaugural with a ready 
hand. At the close of the first month he presented 
to the President a most extraordinary paper entitled 
" Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration, " 
in which he said, in terms not over-diplomatic, that 
so far the administration was " without a policy either 
foreign or domestic. " It must pursue at once a 
novel and aggressive policy, changing " the question 
before the public from one upon slavery or about 
slavery for a question upon union or disunion. It 
must demand explanations from France and Spain, 

21 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

categorically, at once ; " and if satisfactory explana- 
tions " were not received, declare war against them. 
It must be somebody's business to pursue and direct 
this policy incessantly." And he closed with the 
suggestive remark, " It is not my especial province, 
but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsi- 
bility." ' This, as an English biographer aptly puts 
it, was like saying to Mr. Lincoln : " You are doing 
as well as one could expect, under your difficult 
circumstances ; but this, my dear fellow, is a great 
crisis in our history. We need a man. Do you not 
think you had better ask me to help you, and to step 
into your place in order to transact this business ? " ^ 

It was in his reply to this insult that Lincoln showed 
his instinct for leadership. He did not ask for Mr. 
Seward's resignation, as weaker men would have done ; 
he did not make public this marvelous memorandum, as 
more impetuous presidents would have done ; but to his 
Secretary of State, who had thus placed himself at the 
President's mercy, he replied magnanimously and 
firmly, that already his policy had been clearly outlined 
in his inaugural, he saw no reason for changing it, and 
if any policy was to be pursued, he as President must 
do it. He then put away the " Thoughts " among his 
private papers. The incident was closed. Nothing 
was heard of it by any one for a quarter of a century. 

It was an inexplicable thing for an able statesman 
like Mr. Seward to do but it revealed to him unmistak- 
ably the man with whom he was dealing, and from that 
time, be it said to his praise, he was the President's 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

devoted subordinate. A few weeks later he wrote to 
his wife: "Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities. 
The President is the best of us. " ' 

The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase of 
Ohio, was one of the strongest men in Lincoln's cabi- 
net. Imposing in physique and presence, eloquent, 
energetic, and able, experienced as a Governor and a 
Senator, he came to the cabinet with a prestige that 
gave authority to his word. With a confident willing- 
ness did the President turn over to him the exclusive 
management of the Government's treasury ; for, 
although scrupulously honest about paying his debts, 
Lincoln was a poor financier. " Wealth," he once said, 
"is simply a superfluity of what we don't need." And 
he governed himself accordingly. He had borrowed 
money to buy some " store clothes " and pay his initial 
expenses at Vandalia the first time he went to the 
State Legislature, and he borrowed money to pay the 
expenses of his inauguration journey to Washington. 
" Money, " said he, when committees came to consult 
him on important financial questions, " I don't know 
anything about money ! I never had enough of my 
own to fret me. Go to Secretary Chase; he is manag- 
ing the finances." And Mr. Chase undoubtedly did 
his task well, although it was an extremely difficult one 
in those war times ; for, as Mr. Chase said, "the spigot 
in Uncle Abe's barrel" was "twice as big as the 
bung-hole." So well, indeed, did he do his work that 
he got into that most dangerous of all attitudes ; he 
looked upon himself as an indispensable man. Unfor- 

23 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tunately Mr. Chase had an overleaping ambition. The 
presidential bee buzzed in his bonnet and buzzed so 
loud that often he could not hear the voice of his chief. 
Mr. Lincoln at first closed his eyes to these shortcom- 
ings and when a friend told him of Mr. Chase's disloy- 
alty, he turned him off with : " That reminds me of a 
story : ' 

"You were brought up on a farm, were you not? 
Then you know what a * chin fly ' is. My brother and 
I were once plowing corn on a Kentucky farm, I driv- 
ing the horse, and he holding the plow. The horse 
was lazy ; but on one occasion rushed across the field 
so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace 
with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found 
an enormous ' chin fly ' fastened upon him, and I 
knocked it off. My brother asked me what I did that 
for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in 
that way. ' Why, ' said my brother, ' that 's all that 
made him go ! ' Now, if Mr. Chase has a presidential 
' chin fly ' biting him, I 'm not going to knock him off, 
if it will only make his department go.''^ 

After a while, however, so maddening was the sting 
that the public weal demanded that Mr. Lincoln knock 
off the "chin fly." And the patience, magnanimity, 
and political sagacity with which he did this would 
alone mark him as a masterful leader. 

But Mr. Lincoln's supreme accomplishment in the 
mastery of a strong nature, in changing disgust and 
hatred to esteem and good will, was the control of his 
leonine Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton. Mr. Lincoln's 

24 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

first meeting with his future Secretary was not pro- 
phetic of good fellowship. They were associate coun- 
sel in a famous law case in Cincinnati. Although at 
that time Lincoln had a high standing as a lawyer in 
his own State, he was not well known outside of it, and 
Mr. Stanton was inclined to deride his unkempt 
appearance. Indeed, Mr. Lincoln heard him inquire, 
" Where did that long-armed creature come from, and 
what can he expect to do in this case ? " ' Years later, 
when Mr. Lincoln became President, Mr. Stanton, 
retiring from Buchanan's cabinet, resumed the practice 
of law in Washington, and his criticism of Mr. Lincoln 
was caustic and unceasing. He accused the adminis- 
tration of imbecility and dishonesty. He called the 
President " a low, cunning clown, " " the original 
gorilla, " and " often said that DuChaillu was a fool to 
wander all the way to Africa in search of what he 
already could have found in Springfield, Illinois."^ 
But in 1862 Mr. Lincoln saw in Mr. Stanton a forceful, 
determined, tireless patriot, whose services the coun- 
try needed, and casting to the winds all personal ani- 
mosity, he asked him to become a member of his offi- 
cial family. It would breed dissension in the cabinet, 
many thought, and some remonstrated with the Presi- 
dent ; but he, as usual, had a story at his tongue's end. 
" We may have to treat him, " he said, " as they are 
sometimes obliged to treat a Methodist minister out 
West. He gets wrought up to so high a pitch of 
excitement in his prayers and exhortations that they are 
obliged to put bricks in his pockets to keep him down. 

25 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

We may be obliged to treat Stanton the same way but 
I guess we '11 let him jump a while first. " ' 

Mr, Stanton at times surely did jump ; he objected, 
expostulated, fumed, and roared. But with masterful 
skill the President, when necessary, put the bricks into 
his pockets ; or, to change the figure, " ploughed around 
Mars, " as he called his War Secretary. Now it was a 
tactfully worded request ; now it was a patient waiting ; 
again it was a generous concession or a humble remon- 
strance ; but sometimes it was a firm command : '• Let 
this be done at once. A. L. " And then the order 
was obeyed. There were sides of the President's 
character, his humor for example, which the Secretary 
of War could never have understood had they lived 
together a thousand years, but without doubt Mr. 
Stanton spoke sincerely when, standing in the presence 
of death, he said : " There lies the most perfect ruler 
of men the world has ever seen. "^ 

It was thus with sagacity, humor, patience, firmness 
and sincerity that Lincoln mastered great men. Not 
less was his instinct for leadership seen in his dealings 
with common folk. He has been called the Great 
Commoner, To him it was a title of nobility ; for he 
loved the plain people. No man knew them better 
than he ; he was born among them and bred among 
them, indeed was ever of them, a "common man — 
with genius. " He had eaten their food, sat by their 
firesides, rocked their cradles, dug in their fields, argued 
in their grocery stores, watched by their sick, and 
buried their dead ; he knew their ways of living, their 

26 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

methods of reasoning, their vernacular, their supersti- 
tions and bigotry and petty meannesses, their rough 
strength, their common sense, their pleasures and 
wishes and sorrows. With marvelous accuracy he 
foresaw their conclusions and heard their voice from 
afar. And withal he believed in them and they in 
him. To them President Lincoln was ever a friend at 
court. No bar of official pride or circumstance kept 
them from him. He was always accessible, ready to 
hear their complaints, and sympathize with their 
bereavements. To the common soldier he was always 
Father Abraham ; to the common citizen. Honest Abe 
Lincoln, To him they were not subjects but friends. 
They might sometimes be moved by passion and mis- 
led by error but their hearts were right. To " this 
great tribunal of the American people " he was always 
ready to trust his cause. " You " could " fool all of 
them some of the time, and some of them all of the 
time, but you" couldn't "fool all of them all of the 
time. " ' In " the ultimate justice of the people " he 
trusted. " Is there, " said he, " any better or equal 
hope in the world ? " ^ 

"How beautiful to see 
Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, 
Who loved his charge 

His was no lonely mountain peak of mind, 
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, 

A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind ; 

Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, 

Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, 
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. " 3 

27 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

A powerful auxiliary to Lincoln's successful leader- 
ship was the mastery of a clear and noble prose style. 
With less than one year of school training, untaught in 
rhetoric, with no knowledge of any foreign language 
and but scant acquaintance with the English classics, 
he used language so direct and incisive, so idiomatic 
and so chaste, fitting so closely to the thought, so well 
adapted to the occasion, with such perfect restraint and 
noble tone, that to-day English classes at Harvard and 
Bowdoin and many other colleges are studying his 
letters and speeches, and in this and other lands his 
messages are regarded as models of State papers. 
Last year I heard a college president, whose literary 
judgment is highly valued, say that a more fittingly 
expressed letter was never written than Lincoln's letter 
to Mrs. Bixby. A copy of this letter hangs on the 
wall in Brasenose College, Oxford University, England, 
as a model of pure and exquisite diction which has 
never been excelled. How could a nation's gratitude 
to a mourning mother be better expressed than in these 
words ? 

Executive Mansion, 

Washington, Nov. 21, 1864. 
To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass. 

Dear Madam: — I have been shown in the files of 
the War Department a statement of the Adjutant Gen- 
eral of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five 
sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. 
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of 
mine which should attempt to beguile you from the 
grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain 

28 



THE MAN AND THE CRISIS 

from tendering you the consolation that may be found 
in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray 
that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of 
your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished 
memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride 
that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice 
upon the altar of freedom. 

Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 

A. Lincoln.' 

Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech so good an authority as 
Emerson has characterized as one of the two greatest 
orations in American literature. It will surely live as 
long as English letters survive. It is the sublimely 
expressed thought of a great man on a great occasion. 

Still better, some good judges think, is the Second 
Inaugural. '* It is like a sacred poem," says Carl 
Schurz, a critic not likely to exaggerate. " No Ameri- 
can President had ever spoken words like these to the 
American people. America never [before] had a 
President who found such words in the depths of his 
heart. " 

Where did Lincoln get his prose style? He got it 
in his clear, logical intellect that pierced to the very 
core of things. And he found his noblest words in the 
depths of his great heart. That is the source of the 
genuineness with which his words ring and of the deep 
moral tone that resounds through his best prose and 
makes it great. "The style is the man." Lincoln 
wrote thus because he was Lincoln. 

Lincoln was a master of men. He was that and 
more : he was master of a noble English prose style. 

29 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Yes, he was more than that : he was master of himself. 
" He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh 
a city. " Amid all the harrowing perplexities of his 
administration, amid home sorrows that cut deep into 
his soul, amid all the malicious, virulent attacks of his 
enemies and the treachery of those who professed to 
be his friends, he kept his spirit sweet and his heart 
free from bitterness and guile. In a whirlwind he 
stood self-poised, keeping the little things small and 
the big things great, not allowing convention or custom 
to rob him of his honesty or independence, not allow- 
ing the restraints of office, the cruelties of war, or the 
meannesses of others, to sour his humor, kill his kind- 
ness, or rob him of his humanity. 

And, world-old paradox, he was master of himself 
because he recognized that he was not his own master. 
Whatever our theological beliefs may be, like it or not, 
no one of us can study thoroughly the life of this great 
man without being deeply impressed that more and 
more, as those dark days went by, his consciousness 
increased that he was but an instrument in the hands 
of God to do His will. 

In the battle for human liberty in the American 
Republic a great crisis came, and in the fullness of 
time there was a man to meet it. 



REFERENCES 

Page 3. (') Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. III., p. 
291. A study of the life of Lincoln shows one the difficulty of 
getting at the truth concerning details. Contradictory state- 
ments are found on every hand. This account of Lincoln's 
leaving Springfield will illustrate. Nicolay and Hay say that 
" early Monday morning found Mr. Lincoln, his family and suite 
at the rather dingy little railroad station in Springfield, with a 

throng of at least a thousand of his neighbors The 

bystanders bared their heads to the falling snowflakes.'^ Henry 
Bryan Binns in his Abraham Lincoln, p. 207, speaks of the 
hearers standing bareheaded in the rain." And Henry Villard in 
his Memoirs, vol. I., p. 149, writes : " It was diclear, crisp winter 

day. Only about one hundred people were assembled 

at the station." 

Page 4. (') Remarks at Funeral Services, April ig, i86j. 
(2) Nicolay and Hay, vol. II., p. 316. 

Page 5. (^) Mr. Buchanan's Administration, ^. z^j. Quoted 
by Nicolay and Hay, vol. II., p. 340, and by Morse, Abraham 
Lincoln, vol. I., p. 191. (2) New York Tribune, February 23, 
1861. Quoted by Morse, p. 192, and by Binns, p. 201. 

Page 6. (') Richard Henry Stoddard, Abraham Lincoln. (») 
Binns, p. 209. (3) McClure, Abe Lincohi's Yarns and Stories, p. 

382- 
Page 7. (•) Binns, p. 204 ; Morse, vol. I., p. 209. 
Page 8. (■) Morse, vol. I., p. 10; Rothschild, Lincoln, Master 
of Men, p. I; Carl Schurz, Abraham Lincoln, p. 12. (2) Binns, 
p. 7 ; Tarbell, The Early Life of Lincoln, p. 36. (3) Abraham 
Lincoln's Autobiography, Whitney, Life and Works of Abraham 
Lincoln, vol. I., p. 4. (4) Tarbell, Early Life of Lincoln, p. 36. 

Page 9. («) The American Magazine, vol. 65, p. 361. {2) 
Herndon, Life of Lincoln, vol. I., p. 4. 

31 



REFERENCES 

Page II. (') Schurz, p. 17. (2) Lamon, The Life of Abraham 
Lincohi, p. 127; Herndon, Abraham Lincoln, vol. I., p. 49 ; 
Rothschild, p. 49. 

Page 12. (i) Herndon, vol. I, p. 117; Lamon, p. 156; Roths- 
child, p. 156. (2) Curtis, The True Abraham Lincoln, p. 109. 
(3) Curtis, p. 112. 

Page 14. (I) Schurz, p. 27. 

Page 16. (') Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature and Other 
Essays, p. 227. (2) Edwin Markham, Lincoln the Great Com- 
moner. 

Page 19. (") Curtis, p. 331. 

Page 22. («) Nicolay and Hay, vol. III., p. 446. (*) Binns, 
p. 230. 

Page 23. («) Binns, p. 231 ; Curtis, p. 201 ; Rothschild, p. 148. 

Page 24. (') Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, 
p. 129 ; Rothschild, p. 209. For the matter in this and the three 
succeeding paragraphs the author is especially indebted to 
Rothschild, pages 168-288. 

Page 25. (i) Rothschild, p. 225. (2) McClellan's Own Story 
p. 152; Rothschild, p. 227. 

Page 26. (') Holland, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 357; 
Stoddard, Abraham Lincoln, p. 317 ; Rothschild, p. 231. (*) 
Q,\\\\.\.&c^A^x\, Personal Reminiscences, p. 186; Rothschild, p. 288. 

Page 27. {}) V<1\\\^^\^, Story Life of Lincoln, ^. dZ^. {f) First 
Inaugural. (3) Lowell, Commemoration Ode. 

Page 29. (') Whipple, p. 585. 



W60 



